Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Window on Eurasia: Russia has Only Itself to Blame for Break with Ukraine, Shtepa Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, November 26 – Ukrainians taking
part in the Maidan last year wanted to overthrow a corrupt president and move
toward Europe; they were not focused on breaking with Russia. The current
divide between Ukrainians and Russians is thus the result of Russian not
Ukrainian actions, according to Vadim Shtepa.

Shtepa, who travelled to Kyiv as a journalist accredited
by the Lithuanian Russian-language portal RU.DELFI.LT, met with various
Ukrainians including those compiling the new Ukrainian encyclopedia for which
he and other Karelian authors are cooperating with articles on their home
republic.

Having
last been in the Ukrainian capital at the time of the Maidan, Shtepa notes that
Ukrainians have changed under the impact of those events and what has happened
since. On the one hand, they very much regret the losses they have suffered.
But on the other, they are optimistically looking to a future in which Ukraine
will be part of Europe.

Ukrainian
attitudes toward ordinary Russians and Russian speakers have not gotten worse,
although not surprisingly, Shtepa says, Ukrainians are furious at what the
Russian state has done to their country and view its leaders as their enemies.

Those
in the Maidan, he continues, had no plans “to make Russia into an enemy. The Maidan’s
main ideas were rapprochement with Europe and the overthrow of Yanukovich’s
thieving regime. No one was thinking about breaking relations with Russia.” The
idea that [his] overthrow was “something anti-Russian” is an invention of
Moscow propaganda.

Of
course, Shtepa says, “after Crimea and the Donbas, attitudes toward Russia as a
state changed for the worse. But this was not because the Ukrainians themselves
wanted this. It was connected exclusively with the policy which Russia has been
conducting toward Ukraine. Russia, unfortunately, has destroyed the myth of ‘fraternal
peoples.’”

One can easily
understand how that happened and why. “Can a brother annex territory from a
brother? Or to take another analogy so that the position of Ukrainians will be
clear to readers. Imagine that you have an enormous eastern neighbor – for Russia,
this is China. And this neighbor suddenly seizes from your country its far
eastern regions under the pretext that they are ‘Chinese from time immemorial.’”
No Russian would be happy with China in that event.

Shtepa says that he spoke Russian with all of his Kyivan
acquaintances. “They spoke perfectly without an accent and at times even better
than certain Russians. Kyiv in general is traditionally a bilingual city. No
one is going to say anything bad if he or she hears you speaking Russian.”

According to
Shtepa, one doesn’t constantly feel in Kyiv that Ukraine is a country at
war.At the same time, Kyivans are
worried. They are not very far from “an enormous nuclear power which is hostile
to Ukraine … but, on the hand, Kyivans have a great many of the positive
attitudes typical of a South Slavic people.”

Russian media claims that Ukrainians are
afraid of being called into the army are 180 degrees off, Shtepa says. “Many of
those with whom [he] spoke were not against going into the army and even wanted
to do so … In Russia, everyone is trying to avoid serving in the army,” and
that was the case in Ukraine too “until recently.”

Now, however, “the
Ukrainian army is becoming ever more like the armies of Israel, Switzerland or
our neighbor Finland. People joint them willingly,” Shtepa says. “No one tries
to avoid service.”

Russian “propaganda
presents almost all Ukrainians today as fascists. But in the end, things have
turned out just the reverse: it has transformed Russians into fascists and
unleashed in Russia a wild national hatred to ‘the Yukes.’” When he was in
Kyiv, Shtepa says, he saw nothing like that among Ukrainians regarding
Russians.

Obviously, the situation
in southeastern Ukraine is different than in Kyiv. In the Donbas, there is real
suffering and a real “humanitarian disaster” not because of what the Ukrainians
are doing but because of what Russian forces are.Among the results has been an outflow of
refugees. But it is important to recognize that this flow consists of two
parts.

There are those
who have fled to Russia, people whom Shtepa says he would call “’Soviet
refugees’” who were never Ukrainians and who are running away from that
country. But there are many more real “’Ukrainian refugees,’”he adds. They are fleeing from the Russian
violence into the rest of Ukraine. And Kyiv is doing what it can to help them.